Want to dance wiv Calvin Harris?

A few streets from the MTV UK studios where he’s spent the morning, DIY pop star Calvin Harris suddenly does a double take at his schedule.

‘It’s so bizarre, doing this on a daily basis,’ he sniffs, having just caught a cold on a US DJ tour. ‘I’m surprised by everything that happens: talking to cameras, chatting to people whose records I was buying five years ago, like Kylie [Harris contributed to her last album, X], playing headline showsâ¦’ You might have expected Harris to be used to it by now.

Calvin Harris’ next album will be entirely made up of chart offerings

His 2007 debut album I Created Disco featured a typically irreverent title and irrepressible hits including The Girls, Merrymaking At My Place and, most famously, Acceptable In The 80s. Last summer, he also took grime pop to No.1 with his Dizzee Rascal collaboration Dance Wiv Me.

‘Cool people started to like me when I worked with Dizzee, which was quite funny,’ says Harris, adding that they have discussed another grime pop hook-up for Dizzee’s next album. ‘I haven’t settled into a Timbaland-style music production line but I’ve always liked songs with tunes and inevitably that’s pop.’

Harris’s own new single, I’m Not Alone, is a different breed of pop altogether: a melancholy ballad that swells into an electro stormer. ‘I like its unpredictability,’ he says.

‘It’s about feeling too old to go clubbing â I’m 25 now and it does feel a lot older than when I was having my first hit aged 22.’

He does admit that clubbing remains important to his music. ‘Yeah, I wanted to make a track that sounded like âstadium dance musicâ â like Faithless but with a singing bit more like Snow Patrol,’ he grins.

‘My main objective is to make everything louder and literally blow people away.’

Radio 1 DJs have already trumpeted the chart-topping potential of I’m Not Alone but while Harris is given to surreal descriptions, he’s rather reserved about hype.

‘I tried my hardest to get signed as a teenager and it finally happened when I wasn’t looking, after returning to my hometown of Dumfries and doing s*** jobs for years,’ he explains.

‘It’s turned me into a cynical bastard â even when I was literally signing my deal and people were having champagne, I was like: âAye, but the record’s not actually out yet â it could bomb.â’

Harris has never been a creature of convention but with his latest material he experiments further by focusing on a succession of singles which will eventually be packaged as an album ‘bundle’ in late 2009. It’s still a work in progress but the tracks Metro has heard so far sound like his liveliest yet, including the euphoric Ready For The Weekend (his next single, scheduled for June) and Worst Day, featuring US MC Izza Kizza.

‘I do wonder what the point of conventional albums is now that everyone downloads songs,’ he says. ‘There’s no sense in releasing a collection that’s just padded out. A great single should stand out on any playlist.’

Harris’s original breakthrough was partly credited to MySpace and he has now seized on Twitter, where he posts regular absurdist missives (he announced a gig during the ‘lunch break’ at the G20 summit) and indie scene spats.

‘Twitter is best used as a stream-of-consciousness rant,’ he insists. ‘I was in a really angry mood for a couple of days and I doubled my followers.’ He’s currently tracked by about 10,000 people. ‘It’s an average figure,’ he says modestly. ‘Mike Skinner has more than me.’

Doesn’t being ‘followed’ en masse make Harris fear celebrity stalkers? ‘Nah. When I do get spotted, it’s usually because I’m 6ft 5Â¾in, so the reaction I get is: âLook at that tall bastard!â I’m not destined for celebrity,’ he declares.

At that moment, a passing stranger nods at Harris and says: ‘Great music â keep up the good work.’ Harris looks bemused, then chuffed, before lowering his voice conspiratorially: ‘Of course, that man was probably a plant.’

I’m Not Alone (Columbia) is released today. Calvin Harris plays Scala on May 5.